Traveling with Twain

In Search of America's Identity

Posts by Dan Tham (view all)

The Mississippi ends: A day in the French Quarter

New Orleans on a Saturday afternoon felt like a sacred and salacious holiday. With the weather in complicity, we sinned over hot chocolate and beignets at Café du Monde and I quickly learned that breathing is … Read more >>

Mark Silk describes atheism in Twain’s era and the parallels with Christopher Hitchens

Mark Silk heads the Leonard E. Greenberg Center for the Study of Religion in Public life at Trinity College in Hartford, Conn. He is the author of Unsecular Media: Making News of Religion in America and … Read more >>

A Twain trip first: Casualty in Nashville

I woke up with the light in my eyes, because I have been sleeping with at least one lamp on every night since the start of this trip (Embarrassing Admission #1). Vestigial childhood anxiety about the … Read more >>

Old Sturbridge Village printer shows us how it’s done

Though the period represented by Old Sturbridge Village, a living history museum in Sturbridge, Mass., is slightly earlier than when Samuel Clemens worked as a printer, the Village’s printer, 62-year-old William Contino, demonstrates what it was … Read more >>

The ethics of obtaining our interview with Henry Louis Gates Jr.

The video interview we obtained with Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Alphonse Fletcher University Professor and Director of Harvard’s W. E. B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research, symbolizes an issue for journalists, especially … Read more >>